Spam filtering as a proxy for search market share

Why is it that the most basic spams and 419 scams make it past yahoo’s spam filters into my Yahoo inbox? I was willing to go give them a fair shot with their new ui, but their spam filtering is beyond bad, and makes their new mail beta just as unusable as the old one. Almost makes me wonder if they have commercial reasons for letting a lot of spam through to their user base. Not having a capable contextual advertising platform must put them in some tight spots when revenue maximization time inevitably rolls around, and spam thresholds are early victims, I suppose. Even more so at MSN, whose hotmail is even worse. it is the rare event, however, maybe once a month, that spam makes it to my gmail inbox.

The less search market share your email provider has, the more spam you can expect in your inbox.

The new york times reports that gmail spam filtering is getting even better. Meanwhile, the obvious spam in my Yahoo inbox continues.

Looks like yahoo can’t even afford a SSL certificate for their mail domain.. oy. Plus they insist to show you a spammy ‘start page’ instead of your inbox. Someone getting desperate in the monetization department?